The race is not to the swift

Video games: The newest games consoles look surprisingly underpowered and are very similar to PCs. That’s because the business is changing

ON MAY 21st, on a stage flooded with green light, Microsoft unveiled its third video-games console, the confusingly named Xbox One. This followed Sony’s announcement of the PlayStation 4 in February. Together with Nintendo’s Wii U, launched last November, these machines make up the eighth generation of games consoles. They have been a long time coming. Their predecessors were launched in 2005 and 2006, aeons ago by the standards of the computer industry, and were beginning to show their age.

Both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 will go on sale in time for Christmas, and Microsoft and Sony are already competing vigorously to convince potential buyers of the merits of their respective machines. But veterans of such battles will notice a curious absence. At previous console launches, executives have boasted about their boxes’ whizzy technological innards. Sony in particular was a dab hand at this sort of thing, coming up with names like “Emotion Engine” and “Reality Synthesiser” for the chips that powered its previous consoles. But this time neither Microsoft nor Sony seems very keen to talk up the technical prowess of their new boxes.

To be sure, compared with the current generation of machines, graphics will take a leap. But the truth is that the new consoles will be merely catching up with the current state of the art, rather than defining it. Both consoles have about as much raw computing power as a reasonably fast desktop PC and are, for all intents and purposes, ordinary PCs in fancy boxes. Indeed, their technological guts are strikingly similar. That is because of the way the gaming industry is changing.

The chips that power both the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 are modified, beefed-up versions of a chip produced by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), which has long been Intel’s only competitor when it comes to the processors that power desktop PCs. For Microsoft, this marks something of a return to its roots. The original Xbox, released in 2001, was based on a standard Intel Pentium chip. But all of Sony’s previous consoles have featured custom chips built for gaming.

Power underwhelming

Going with a general-purpose PC chip will limit the new machines’ performance. But there are good reasons to make that trade-off. One is simply that the cost of designing chips has risen dramatically as they have become more complicated, says Jordan Selburn of IHS iSuppli, a market-research firm that specialises in computer hardware. At the same time, the benefits of customisation have shrunk. These days, most of the innovation in graphics processing is confined to two big companies, AMD and Nvidia. It makes sense to leave the job to these specialists.

The business reasons for switching to more standardised components are compelling, too. The traditional business model for a games console is to sell the machines themselves at a loss (at least in the years after their launch, before technological advances bring manufacturing costs down) and to make up for it by taking a cut from the sale of each game. These days, however, consoles face stiff competition from games played on mobile devices or running inside web browsers. In this newly competitive environment, Microsoft and Sony may prefer a less risky strategy. Using standard parts cuts costs.

It also makes life easier for the firms that create games. Mastering the intricacies of a custom-made chip can take programmers many years, a problem that was particularly acute with the unusual chip that powered the PlayStation 3. The new consoles’ PC-like architecture will make developing games much more straightforward. It will also make it easier to create games that run on both new consoles and on PCs too, and to release them simultaneously. Game prices have not risen for many years, even in nominal terms, but the cost of creating them has ballooned. Simultaneous release on multiple platforms maximises the potential market.

Besides, ever-snazzier graphics are only one area in which gaming firms can innovate, and one in which returns are diminishing. The first games with elaborate, three-dimensional game worlds, such as “Quake” and “Tomb Raider”, were revolutionary when they appeared in the mid-1990s. These days, extra graphical power is used for more subtle features such as more accurate lighting or more realistic-looking hair. With each new generation of consoles, the improvement in graphics is less dramatic. This means console-makers must find other ways to convince gamers to upgrade.

Given that the two new consoles are so similar internally, the obvious means of differentiation is in novel control mechanisms. Nintendo led the way in 2006 with the launch of its Wii console, which did not try to compete with the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 in graphical power, but instead used innovative motion-sensitive controllers to appeal to people who would not normally consider playing video games. Microsoft responded with the Kinect, a camera-based system that allows players to control the on-screen action through their body movements, and Sony launched the Move, a wand-like controller. The Xbox One incorporates an improved version of the Kinect, and Sony will offer an optional camera attachment for the PlayStation 4.

All three console-makers have also been keen to emphasise non-gaming uses of their consoles such as streaming live television, browsing the web, making video calls and accessing social networks. Indeed, at the launch of the Xbox One, Microsoft barely mentioned games at all for the first half-hour. It was a clear sign that the days when consoles slugged it out solely on the basis of graphical-processing power are well and truly over.